Tag: writing

A listing of some books people mentioned at the last Salon, in response to an Adult Sex-Ed Question: “What are some really good erotica readings?” Presumably to get turned on while reading. Before you read the list (below this article) you might be interested in several short videos of women getting turning on while reading, but not by the words – a hidden vibrator. Fun to watch nonetheless.

Women Orgasm While Reading… For The Sake Of Art, Of Course (NSFW)

In the videos below, a series of women sit at a desk and read a book of their choosing aloud. As their reading session continues, you may notice a quickness of breath, some fumbling over easily legible words, light panting, shivering, giggling and moaning.

No, these physical reactions aren’t responses to the texts themselves, but rather to an unseen assistant pleasuring said women with vibrators under the table. Eventually, they climax. The piece, by artist Clayton Cubitt, is titled “Hysterical Literature,” and is slated to go on view as part of Mass MoCA’s “Bibliothecaphilia“ exhibition later this month.

“I sat the readers at a table,” Cubitt told The Daily Beast, “and I showed what society wants to see on top of the table, and I hid the sex under the table. I wanted to see what people would react to more: what they could see, or what they imagined.”

“Bibliothecaphilia” addresses the quiet, mystical allure of the library — a space of escape, of solitude, of transcendence. With the rise of eBooks and library apps, these strange sacred spaces sometimes teeter on becoming obsolete. The group show features artists who unpack our appetites for libraries in all their physical and mythical glory.

While Cubitt’s video series certainly touches on the love of libraries, it simultaneously explores themes of feminism, sexuality, hysteria and authenticity. The moving portraits, shot in stark black-and-white, are part fine art, part viral click-bait, part literary ode, part pornography.

Despite the obvious erotic appeal of Cubitt’s project, the importance extends beyond just sex. For many of the female participants, the session presented an opportunity for women to proudly express their sexualities and retain their power — a man is never pictured on screen. “This is my revolutionary act of selfishness,” wrote one participant of her experience, “my virtual picket sign… my one-woman rally… my rebel yell… my sedentary march… a call for dialogue and understanding.”

The series title, “Hysterical Literature,” alludes to Victorian-era treatments for female “hysteria,” which often incorporated vibrating patients. It also evokes associations to the religious ecstasies of the middle ages, as the subjects’ spoken words are imbued with erotic ecstasy.

The films, at once intellectually and sexually stimulating, juxtapose the cultured pursuit of reading with the more deviant pastime of masturbation. “I don’t remember exactly when I decided to combine this with reading.“ Cubitt explained, “At some point it occurred to me that the choice of books is such a personal one, that it could serve as a proxy for our idealized personality, while the physical distraction could try to destroy it. And that also allowed me to poke fun at the idea that our mind is somehow ‘better’ or more ‘us’ than our body. How nobly we view the act of reading, compared to the act of sex.”

“The authors I mentioned the other night were Emma Holly and Cecilia Tan. I may have mentioned a few others but I can’t remember offhand.

Holly writes erotic romances, often delving into paranormal erotica and BDSM. Some of her works are more toward mainstream romance, but when she turns toward *erotic* erotica she writes some of the best sex scenes I’ve ever seen in print. I recommend All U Can Eatand Cooking Up A Storm– both contemporary erotica standalone books. Her website is http://emmaholly.com/

Cecilia Tan is one of my personal heroes. Not only does she fuse sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction with erotica, often with BDSM & LGBTQ themes, she also founded Circlet Press (“Erotica for Geeks”, http://circlet.com/) which is devoted to publishing that genre. Her short story collection Black Feathersis a good starting point, or her novel The Velderet. Her personal website is http://ceciliatan.com/.

I also mentioned BookBub (http://bookbub.com/), which collects discounted and free ebook offers. I subscribe to their daily newsletter, which nearly always includes at least one erotica title (too often along the lines of the dreaded “Sexy Billionaire” trope) and often has free titles. There are similar services out there but so far BookBub is the only one I know of that includes erotica.

Who else? Janine Ashbless (http://www.janineashbless.com/), Rose Caraway’s The Sexy Librarian’s Big Book of Erotica, (S&S’s Cleis Press imprint, http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Sexy-Librarians-Big-Book-of-Erotica/Rose-Caraway/9781627780773), and a big shout out to anything by Logan Belle (the author, not to be confused with the singer-songwriter: http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Logan-Belle/406674085).

That’s all I’ve got for now.” – Thank you Jon

I would like to add: Violet Blue, an erotica author and editor. Her website https://www.tinynibbles.com has a great blog and links to her work at Literate Smut on her menu bar.

Overwhelmed and filled with gratitude for all the readers, behind the scenes folks, and co-host Heather Shayne Blakeslee of Red Group Ventures who helped create this wonderful event. It made me realize just how valuable the Salon is as a sanctuary for “homeless” pieces.

The audio piece heard at the museum today:

The Spilled Seed Chronicles by Panmi

A story of spilled seed.

The first time he spilled his seed in vain was during a wet dream that he had on a Saturday afternoon in August shortly after our wedding. We were napping in our separate beds. He turned toward me still asleep, in the dusk and breathed out a sigh of longing. I knew that he was dreaming of me, of my body in my modestly long-sleeved nightgowns, demure and high necked yet outrageously revealing in the light of the morning when the white cotton fabric did a poor job of disguising the shape of my limbs, the rose tinged tips of my breasts and the mysterious dark hollow between my thighs.

We were strangers to each other still, having met for a brief supervised date and married to each other after that one hour long encounter and a six month interval of separation between the engagement and the wedding. We were strangers yes, but we were adolescents still and giving two healthy nineteen-year-olds permission to fuck (albeit with a string of rules and boundaries to go with it. After all it wouldn’t do to have those kids run wild completely, would it?) is one way of getting them to know each other rather quickly.

After that first wet dream, he felt really bad about his rebellious body and went to immerse himself in the purifying waters of the mikvah, three times, three times, for good measure… and after he returned from the ritual bathhouse he looked at me with hurt in his eyes, almost accusingly because:

Why did I have to be such a temptress and why must the marital purity laws be so difficult and the consequences so severe?

Another time, in those early years of living together, still learning how to be with each other, how to love and comfort please and address each other’s needs and desires. We only had two weeks out of each month to explore and engage with each other physically, sexually and two weeks of remote and distant loving, where verbal communication was the maker or breaker of everything that would come after.

We did this this careful and disciplined practice of separation for two weeks out of each monthly cycle, we did this,oh yes we still do this now: no touching, no passing objects, no sharing space on a bench, a couch or a bed. During one of those early endless separation periods it was. I remember him finding me sprawled on my bed in tears, because I had a difficult day at work and there were no arms to comfort me upon my return home. Well, he moved closer and closer to the bed as if pulled by an invisible string to the source of his longing and sat on the floor under where I lay.

That night we breathed on each other deliberately, so close to one another that his breath stirred my eyelashes. We breathed so that the vapor from our mouths mingled like pussy juice and cum. We blew onto each other and pretended that we were fucking. I guess that was the second time the seed was spilled in vain.

More recently, we lay again in our separate beds, this time with endless practice. We were by then resigned to our monthly diet of satiation and deprivation, yet the budding awareness of lack, of loss, of the years that had unspooled behind us, month after month, wait after wait, making us feel the press of time and lost opportunity.

This time I had my shirt buttons open and my nipples brazenly exposed above my loosened lace bra, I had one finger pressing my clit and the other running moisture up and down the lips of my vulva and he? He was in his bed three feet away, hungry eyes on my body devouring the scene, his hand slick with pre-cum, pumping pumping, spilling the wasted seed all over his thighs, why why why, and how did it come to this…to this!? This blatantly, daring, careless disregard for the law, this recklessly impatient lack of self-control?

We were on a slippery cum slick slide to perdition, he and I, and it kept getting worse.

A month later he was standing over me still not touching, but he had his fly unbuttoned and his cock in hand and warm semen was spilling over his fist and onto my naked body, while I lay like a wanton, like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a veritable bitch in heat yearning for the simplest of contact for the merest whisper of his touch, for his hands on my burning body but having to settle for this… almost act.

This was sex in every way that mattered except one, there was still no touching, no crossing the great forbidding divide to lay his body upon mine and his cock in my pussy.

Still with his warm cum over my tits and throat, I felt the clawing suffocation of guilt wash over me. Icy tendrils of guilt accompanied the spilled seed as it trickled into the crevices of my body.

Because the thing is I knew then and do today that there is a method to this ages old madness, these laws of separation. The passion, the sexual energy is rekindled by the forced separation, I suspect that were we to have access to each other without boundaries and limitations, the chances are good that we would not find each other after two decades of marriage, so intriguing and desirable. On the other hand we are more than partners by now. We are soul mates fused to each other with shared tears, blood, sorrow, joy, love and pain, and to imagine that we cannot be trustedto touch each other when we need to, can feel limiting and frustrating to an extreme.

I know what you are thinking, because I am sure by now you are, he can still to this day swear on all that is holy before God our witness, because isn’t that the real truth? Only God is our witness in the privacy of our bedroom anyway, that while I was in the Niddah period he has never laid hands on me. So how can you pray- tell on us- to God? Because after all is said and done there has been no penetration no desecration of Biblical injunction, he did not, as the Bible states, ‘lay with her as a man does with a woman’.

He has not, but listen to this:

Last week I had my glass cock in my pussy, writhing on the bed in a hectic and flagrant display and He? He had his cock buried first in a condom! And then deep inside our shared lover’s snatch. She said, as I watched him move above her in the bed next to mine, “Wait, hold on a minute, isn’t there a problem with you guys passing me, a person, to each other? Because you sure are passing me around…” And then she roared with laughter and we laughed with her because, a suspicion was dawning on us that this sort of passing was the opposite of what the Talmudic sages intended when they instituted the sacred separation laws.

We had found the ultimate loophole because I was making out with her, and she in turn was fucking him, but all said, we had still not laid hands on each other, we had found a way to love, to touch, to explore and to fuck. Without laying with each other at all. I was not with him, we were both fucking her without touching each other, fucking in spite of the immutable, impenetrable, no-fucking-allowed laws, fucking my glass cock, and our sweet partner…no one said anything about that!!! Fucking with the sacred, thousand year old laws of separation. May God forgive us, our grave sins of omission, and the years of wasted spilled seed.

My new favorite website: http://jewrotica.org where this piece and other steamy works of Panmi can be found.

EBOOK – “SenSexual: A Unique Anthology 2013”

SUBSCRIBE NEWSLETTER

FREE bi-monthly newsletter packed with information regarding the Salon, special events in the Philadelphia area and beyond. To subscribe send email with 'subscribe' in the subject line. Contact The Erotic Literary Salon PCSalons@gmail.com Please add to your address book; newsletter sent out as mass mailing.

4 Videos Below-Readings are only recorded at the request of the presenter.

Monica Day performance/reading two poems: The Fifth Year and This is My Body for January 2013 Erotic Literary Salon
M. Dante reading SKIN dedicated to the art and inspiration of Heide Hatry for December 2013 Erotic Literary Salon
Frances' reading,“Go the Fok to Sleep”
Dr. Susana Mayer’s NBC10 interview of “50 Shades of Grey”